At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”)

The Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat Represents the Stylish Repression of the Sexual Urges of the Hat-Wearing Woman -- the Hat is a "Pillbox", thus referencing both Birth Control and Containment --, and How those Urges Create a Corresponding Attraction in the Male, as the Leopard-Skin Pattern Stimulates Animal Urges. This Becomes More Obvious in the Following Lines, where the Titular Hat is Compared to A Mattress:

1. "When I was growing up, the prevailing sex ed was that you,
male or female, were wholly responsible for your own birth control and
that you should never assume or believe that the other person was taking
care of it. That's not the prevailing wisdom anymore?"

2.
"Maybe all those traditionally religious people don't hate sex--maybe
they have all those prohibitions on sex outside marriage for some other
reason... It's like there was a plan for all of this or something."

I suspect he wouldn't want to hear my truly dismissive response, but if you search the comments at my somewhat dismissive response... and over here... you can extrapolate what it would be. I'll cherry-pick some clues as to what I would say if I chose to go hard-core on this subject.

"Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. 'Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe' -- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself."

An old quote that crosses my mind as I realize I have yet to check the news this morning.

Do you recognize that quote? It's from the oft-quoted "Walden," and I'm amused to see the next paragraph:

1. So said Wycliffe's Bible, in Middle English, around 1382, translating a proverb that can be more easily understood in the King James form, from 1611: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly." No need to get more modern than that.

2. "Returneth" is nice (and helpful to those who lisp). The double "returneth" may seem more poetic than "turneth... rehersith." But you've got to love "fooli" for "folly." The older form is more accessible. And "spuyng" for "vomit"... surely, we lost something there.

3. "Dog" is a very old word of unknown etymology, according to the (unlinkable) OED, which proceeds to explain this particular unknown at great length. Do you prefer the older form "dogge"? (Which I presume was pronounced "doggie.")

4. I'm rummaging around in the OED under "dog" after writing that first post of the day, about the dog vomit fungus, which was the first post today because it's something that came up on the front lawn overnight. (Some things come up in conversation, and other things come up on the front lawn.) The OED has no entry for the fungus, but I tumbled upon the old aphorism, and thought you might find some use for it.

5. I, of course, was returning to my old fooli, having blogged about dog vomit fungus in 2006, and, in fact, I was inclined to return to another old fooli: dog's breakfast, which sounds like something you could order at The Slime Mold Café, which could have been the name of that first post (since it fits the Althouse blog model of a "café" post, having a photograph and an open-ended invitation to talk).

1915 New Castle (Pa.) News 13 Feb. 2/5 They abandoned the plan, went ahead in their own way, and have gotten their side all messed up, like a dog's breakfast.
1959 Times 29 Apr. 10/4 He can't make head or tail of it... It's a complete dog's breakfast.
2004 Classic Rock Oct. 102/3 The 1974 record..is either the furthest-reaching concept album ever made, or the biggest dog's breakfast in the entire history of the state of California.

7. What 1974 record? Can you guess without Googling? I'll give you another excerpt:

Here, no longer held back by the leashes of a mere rock band, Ray wastes no time wading right into a carnival of jazz and samba, synth and rumba, rock-opera and boogie-woogie, all the while wearing golden Tutankhamun facepaint and global new-age influences on his sleeve.

8. Ray was not returning to his old fooli, but moving on to new fooli. How about you?

Oh, it's slime mold. Dog Vomit Fungus! Remember? I mentioned it here once, you know, that day when I deliberately vomit-blogged. But I've never seen it in my yard before, even though I have seen -- and photoblogged -- some pretty impressive fungus, fungus that makes you think not of vomiting, but of one of those other bodily activities.

4. Meade says he remembers and claims to have participated, and I said it was before his time. (If you click the first link at #3, you'll see it was 2006, 3 years before I met Meade.) He says: "In the comments." I look. "Ah, yes! You're the first commenter":

Meade said...

Is that fresh mulch? Might have come with that. Could be worse - you could have stinkhorn mushrooms... you know - Phallus impudicus.

And Dr. Krokowski had spoken about one fungus, famous since classical antiquity for its form and the powers ascribed to it -- a morel, its Latin name ending in the adjective impudicus, its form reminiscent of love, and its odor, of death. For the stench given off by the impudicus was strikingly like that of a decaying corpse, the odor coming from greenish, viscous slime that carried its spores and dripped from the bell-shaped cap. And even today, among the uneducated, this morel was thought to be an aphrodisiac.

6. What did you wake up to this morning? Are your spores dripping from your bell-shaped cap?

Yeah, but I'm not talking about married men. Once you're married, you should be consulting with your wife. If you're not, you've got problems.

Anyway, if these doctors are asking because the law requires it, the men should win their legal challenge. But I suspect the doctors are asking because they're afraid of getting sued, in which case, the men need to establish their rights in court so they can out-scare the doctors.

He's mostly focused on sympathy for males who must pay child support, but I think society has chosen to put the burden on men to control where they put their sperm. Imagine endless factual disputes over whether the woman claimed to be infertile or on pills. The child is real and needs support, and anyone who expressed horror — as Instapundit did — at "The Life of Julia" should understand why we hold men responsible for the consequences they risk.

To save commenters the trouble of telling me again: I know, there was an underage boy one time who was the victim of statutory rape and made to pay child support. So craft a narrow exception for people like him. The general principle is a good one.

If you're thinking of bringing up the woman's right to choose to avoid a pregnancy, let me repeat that this is a decision that properly belongs to the woman. Pregnancy occurs inside the woman's body, where the man lost control of his sperm. He should have been more risk averse.

Now, here's a proposal, based on all the attention Obamacare has given to women's health. Let's require health insurance to cover vasectomies. Then there will be some surgery that men have a right to choose. How's that for a pro-equality policy? Men can freeze their sperm beforehand and thereafter have perfect control over when women get hold of their reproductive powers.

[The Medical Examiner Dr.] Bao is reading his answers off personal notes. "I typed out potential answers to your potential questions." West asks to see the notes, but Bao replied "I'd rather you not." Judge Nelson tells him both sides' attorneys are entitled to view his notes.

Bao looked very nervous to me. He protested that he'd written these notes by himself, on his own time, but after he referred to them while testifying, the defense lawyers now get to look at everything, perhaps including notes about the doctor's discussions with the prosecutor.

Bao was the state's last witness, this Friday afternoon, and now things seem quite chaotic.

... Kerry, who owns a house and a yacht on the ritzy retreat, was seen yesterday strolling down Federal Street away from July Fourth festivities on Main Street in jeans and a light-colored polo shirt. Later in the afternoon, Kerry was seen offloading bags from a single-person kayak to a boat in Nantucket Sound after launching from the beach behind his home at 5 Hulbert Ave....

Kerry’s staff yesterday insisted he’s fully engaged and has been logging long hours and high miles, including a recent 12-day, 25,000-mile trip to the Middle East and Asia.

This reminds me of the way Hillary Clinton's people argued for her success as Secretary of State — all the many miles flown. I don't really care about the number of days spent traveling as opposed to the effectiveness handling specific matters in the right places and times.

Yesterday he dialed into a meeting with President Obama and members of his national security team in the Situation Room, according to the State Department. Kerry also called foreign dignitaries from Egypt, Israel, Norway, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

He phones it in. How's the cellphone service out in Nantucket Sound? What's it like phoning on a single-man kayak?

“Secretary Kerry has been working tirelessly around the clock since he returned from his 10-day trip and there has not been a moment where he has not been focused on doing everything possible to communicate with his team in Washington and in Egypt, within the administration and with his counterparts around the world,” Kerry spokeswoman Jen Psaki told the Herald last night.

Then he wasn't kayaking properly. Also, you see the message? He needs his vacation. He's earned it. Not acceptable in a time of emergency in a position of high responsibility. We don't care how hard you worked or whether you're due for a rest. You shouldn't be in the job if you aren't ready to work nonstop. I wrote those sentences before reading this next part:

Former state Democratic Party chairman Phil Johnston said these days the secretary of state can effectively work out of anywhere in the world. “The man’s been working 24/7 for weeks to create peace in the Middle East — I think he’s entitled to a day on Nantucket,” said Johnston. “If there’s anything we know about John Kerry, it’s that he’s a very hard worker. The American people don’t need to worry about that.”

ADDED: I don't like "The man’s been working 24/7 for weeks to create peace in the Middle East" as a premise for the argument that Kerry's entitle to a vacation, but I could see using it to argue that his work is something we're better off without it.

But his son, 8-year-old Joshua [Garcia], wriggled out the wreckage, waded through the rushing water, scaled an embankment, then walked more than half a mile home to alert his mother, who called 911.

I find this touching and inspiring, but on reflection, since the man and the boy were not in immediate danger, I think that perhaps staying together on the sandbar and yelling and waiting for help would have been better than what the boy did.

The Mitchell family’s claim includes Third Amendment violations, a rare claim in the United States. The Third Amendment prohibits quartering soldiers in citizens’ homes in times of peace without the consent of the owner.

Police lookout = quartered soldiers? There's also the question whether the 3d Amendment even applies to local government, but obviously there are other claims here and the mere reference to the 3d Amendment creates a sense of alarm about the intrusions.

ADDED: The mother, Sabryna Fulton, testified for about 15 minutes, mostly only to identify the voice on the 911 recording as her son's. The cross-examination was short, focusing on: 1. the circumstances under which she first heard the recording (the basis of an argument to be made, presumably, that she was influenced by others or that she didn't react quite the same the first time), and 2. that she must have hoped the voice was her son's, since if it was not, she would have had to deal with the necessary (or nearly necessary) inference that her son was at least in part responsible for his own death.

"Anywhere in the world, whoever uses religion for political aims, or to benefit some and not others, will fall... You can't fool all the people all the time, let alone the Egyptian people who have a civilization that is thousands of years old, and who espouse clear, Arab nationalist thought."

An Amazon fulfillment associate might have to walk as far as 15 miles in a single shift, endlessly looping back and forth between shelves in a warehouse the size of nine soccer fields. They do this in complete silence, except for the sound of their feet. The atmosphere is so quiet that workers can be fired for even talking to one another. And all the while, cardboard cutouts of happy Amazon workers look on, cartoon speech bubbles frozen above their heads: "This is the best job I ever had!"

"The workers at Rugeley are effectively human robots," [photographer Ben] Roberts says. "And the only reason Amazon doesn’t actually replace them with robots is they’ve yet to find a machine that can handle so many different sized packages."

WaPo doesn't seem to understand that in a world of ebooks and "search inside the book" Amazon pages, you don't need to look names up in an index to see whether and where they appear in a book.

I suspect that if there's no index in this book, it's to save printing expenses and because they wouldn't want anyone to assume that if a particular name isn't in the index, it isn't in the book. Now, you might say, but maybe Amazon won't have "search inside the book" for this particular book, and if people want to do a search within an ebook, they'll have to buy the ebook, so more books will be sold. But that assumes there are cheapskates — among the super-busy Washingtonians — who would go to a physical bookstore, find the actual paper version of this book, and look up names in an index. Anyone who cares that much would just download the damned Kindle edition from Amazon, which would take about 10 seconds. The search would be accomplished in well under a minute. Even if it's overpriced at $12.74, what is your time worth? And by "you," I mean some Washington entity who is important enough to imagine he'd get mentioned in a gossipy book by a NYT reporter, and yet not important enough not to care.

"Recently, a friend became pregnant after a one-night stand. Everyone assumes that was an accident, but she confided in me that she had been seeking out sex with the purpose of getting pregnant. I was so relieved to meet someone else who planned an 'accidental' pregnancy that it made me wonder if I should open up about my secret."

From a letter to the advice columnist Prudie. I haven't yet read Prudie's answer. I just want to say that this woman imagines that she's found her counterpart in this other woman, but she hasn't. The letter-writer deceived a man with whom she had a serious relationship, letting him think she was still on contraceptive pills, and she's clung to her secret for many years, including from the man she married. She's kept the old boyfriend and the husband in the dark even as she's involved both of them in the upbringing of the child. That's years of hardcore deceit. This other lady is sleeping around with men she doesn't seem to care much about. And who knows what she told them about birth control? And she was apparently ready to blab about it as soon as the pregnancy happened. She's out and proud. It's way too late to emulate her. She's nothing like you.

Now I've read Prudie's answer. Excerpt: "There’s nothing to be gained by telling your husband and making him uneasy about your essential honesty." Essential honesty? The letter-writer's only indication of honesty (in everything but the central lie of her life) was "I'm mentally stable, and I have a pretty unremarkable suburban life." As if unremarkable suburbanites are honest.

"... refers to leaving a social gathering without saying your farewells. One moment you’re at the bar, or the house party, or the Sunday morning wedding brunch. The next moment you’re gone. In the manner of a ghost. 'Where’d he go?' your friends might wonder. But — and this is key — they probably won’t even notice that you’ve left."

One woman required surgery after being raped with a “sharp object,” volunteers with the [Egyptian group Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault] said. In other cases, women were beaten with metal chains, sticks, and chairs, and attacked with knives. In some cases they were assaulted for as long as 45 minutes before they were able to escape.

Pointing to his manager Julia Ramadan, Prince says, "I talk to her. She talks to you."

ADDED: Prince's assertion that he doesn't need a cell phone because no one really talks to him made me think of this from the David Sedaris book "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls":

I was in London, squinting out my kitchen window at a distant helicopter, when a sales rep phoned from some overseas call center. “Mr. Sedriz?” he asked. “Is that who I have the pleasure of addressing?”...

“I am hoping this morning to interest you in a cell phone,” he announced. “But not just any cell phone! This one takes pictures that you can send to your friends.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “But I don’t have any friends.”

He chuckled. “No, but seriously, Mr. Sedriz, this new camera phone is far superior to the one you already have.”

Here's a screen grab showing links that have been up all day at Drudge:

If you click on those 2 Facebook links, you'll see those pages have been taken down, but I clicked on them at around 8 a.m. CT, and I was surprised to see how few "likes" they had, even after being linked from Drudge for about an hour. I remember seeing only 31 likes for one and something similar for the other. That is, this big effort at stirring people up wasn't working too well. So consider that Drudge is doing his thing. Which is what? Getting us to think of black people as dangerous and criminal? Ironically, that's the stereotype the prosecutor wants the jury to believe that Zimmerman believed.

Who are these "people"/"just one person"? Who are we talking about? We're seeing pre-calming, which is good, especially since — after seeing the trial thus far — it's hard to imagine anything but acquittal. But who is hoping for post-trial violence? I like seeing that people are not hot-headedly itching for a riot. I like to think people are fair-minded and rational. So let's keep a sharp eye out for whoever it is that is looking to foment disorder.

"At the time, the only way those and other scientists interacted with computers, the mainframe machines of their day, was by submitting stacks of punch cards to them and waiting hours for a printout of answers.... For the event he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display on a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he had invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing. In contrast to the mainframes then in use, Dr. Engelbart had created a computerized system he called the 'oNLine System' or NLS, which allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library."

"Not only do they need to fix things for people already here, or find some way to do it, there’s got to be a larger way to fix the system in the first place... Because if it wasn’t so cumbersome, if there wasn’t such a long wait, if it wasn’t so difficult to get in, we wouldn’t have the other problems that we have (with people living here illegally)."

... you can talk about anything you want, but this photo is from longtime commenter Hazy Dave, who was pleased by the painterly effect of the digital zoom on his cheap smartphone. (Click to enlarge and see the effect.)

I'm told this picture was taken "on the shortcut from New Glarus back to the Badger State Trail on Sunday - which was a mistake, by the way - big nasty hills instead of gentle railbed pedaling."

Princess Fawzia, a member of Egypt's last royal family and the first wife of Iran's later-deposed monarch, has died, Iranian opposition groups said... She was the daughter of Egyptian King Fuad I, who ruled until 1936. Her brother and nephew later rose to the throne before the monarchy was toppled in 1953.

In 1939, she married married Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when she was 18 and he was 19. He became the Shah of Iran in 1941. They divorced a few years later.

But that was long ago. Here's some news of the coup they say is happening now.

"... (Kobarid was in these years under Italian rule). As if there would be no other war. As if Kobarid was heading toward a peaceful era, where one could look back and reflect on the horror of past aggressions. Mussolini had moved the remains of 7014 known and unknown Italian soldiers who lost their lives in the Soca Front — taking them from local military cemeteries and honoring them here, in this house of corpses. We walk slowly around the edifice, reading the names, understanding the pain that each death caused to those left behind, feeling the irony of this Mussolini gesture and the exclusive pride in the Italian sacrifice, ignoring the pain felt, too, by Slovenian people who lost lives as well, in addition to losing pasture lands, cattle, a livelihood that had been very much centered on the mountains towering over the Soca River."

Here's a pro-abortion rights column from the Capital Times titled "Aggressive new abortion restrictions take hold in Wisconsin." Excerpt:

Wisconsin’s shift toward severely restricting women’s access to reproductive health care can’t be attributed to a swing in public opinion. Nor is it being driven by a call for change from the state’s medical community. Instead, it’s being driven by tea party politicians wielding their power at the state Capitol.

I just want to talk about the illustration, which you can see in full at the link. Here's a closeup:

The LaCrosse Tribune has this story about a 9-year-old boy, who was sitting with this mother — according to the mother's report to the police — at an outdoor café, when up walked Curtis Baltz — a 36-year-old man whose alcohol level was later tested at 0.20. Baltz said "What’s wrong with your tooth?"

The child flashed his loose tooth and Baltz flicked it, according to reports. His mother rushed him inside when his mouth filled with blood....

Baltz told police he had permission to pull the tooth. He also said his father and grandfather were dentists, so he "knew what he was doing."

I've rarely read such a short story with so many unbelievable elements.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you salute it when we run it up the flagpole will we know it's you.

He seeks to increase predictability and to reduce the risks associated with judicial discretion. He favors general rules, not case-by-case judgments. In his view, such rules simplify life for ordinary people and the legal system as a whole. They also reduce the danger that political preferences will end up dominating judicial decisions....

One of the most vivid writers in the court's history, he knows how to deliver a punch. Sometimes he seems to think that people who don't see things his way aren't merely in error but are also foolish, unacceptably political, even lawless.

Those who disagree with Scalia are entitled to object to his votes and his tone. At the same time, they should understand that his broadest commitment is to the rule of law. They should honor that commitment, and they should respect his efforts to develop an approach to interpretation that is compatible with it.

Sunstein absolves Scalia of partisanship: He's committed to the rule of law and not to "any political ideology."

I offer this proposition for debate: Sunstein himself is a political ideologue playing a partisan game, and this absolution for Scalia is a clever gambit.

In the majority opinion, the justices noted the 1987 law that protects faith healing states that a person is not guilty of an offense because he or she provides a child with treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone.

But the justices agreed with the prosecutor that the treatment through prayer provision applies only to charges of criminal child abuse and does not create a blanket protection from criminal prosecution for a parent....

The Neumanns claim that the reckless homicide statute is too murky to give sufficient notice as to when parental choice of treatment through prayer becomes illegal. Given the nature of Kara's illness, as well as the imprecision in the statutory language, I agree. There is a due process problem here. On the facts before us, the statutes are very difficult to understand and almost impossible to explain. Indeed, the statutory scheme is so difficult to explain that if a prayer-treating parent were to consult an attorney on how he or she could prayer treat and stay within the bounds of the law, virtually any attorney would be at a loss to reasonably advise the client. The concerns stated would not have been so pronounced if the Neumanns had been prosecuted under the child neglect statute....

In an emotional, rambling midnight television address, Mursi said he was democratically elected and would stay in office to uphold the constitutional order, declaring: "The price of preserving legitimacy is my life."

At one point, the girls had a falling out. The girl who took the photo started to show it to classmates and distribute it digitally, police said.

"More and more teenagers are sending pictures of themselves and each other in compromising poses," Officer Melanie Snow said. "We want children and parents to know that this is a felony. It's not just some silly thing that won't have a long-term effect on your life."

Are felony prosecutions targeting one foolish teenager the right way to send this message?

Nuttall and Korody are said to be "recovering drug addicts and recent converts to Islam." Obviously, other Muslims in Canada aren't pleased to look connected to them. Musa Ismail, president of the B.C. Muslim Association, says:

"We don't know these people, we've never seen these people.... We are proud citizens, we are proud Canadians. These two individuals have nothing to do with Islam, as far as we know."

And while the entire B.C. Muslim community is "absolutely delighted" that Mounties intervened to stop a "potentially huge disaster," Ismail said the RCMP's description of the Canadian-born duo as inspired by Al-Qaeda is an "ill-worded reference" that will focus undue attention on Muslims.

"These are just individuals who copied whatever happened in Boston," he said.

The other day, I was blogging about tags, and somebody asked what are all the tags. I considered adding a sidebar gadget that would show all the tags, but I saw that there were over 3,000 of them. For what its worth, I've copied and pasted the list of tags, which you can see after the jump.

The number in parens is the number of times I've used the tag. The list is in alphabetical order, with the top of the list being tags that were originally written with quotation marks. This is something the software no longer lets me do, so some of those tags reappear without quotation marks, and thus the numbers in parens for the tags with quotation marks are not accurate.

If you want to find the posts that have a particular tag, copy and paste the word(s) into the search box at the top left of this page, and when you find a post that has that tag, click on that tag. In other words, forgive me for not taking the time to make this list all hot links.

How/why/wherefore did it turn out this way? The evidence suggests a combination of hubris, errant revisionism, a misguided and perverse degree of violence, and a script that never worked in the first place.

"Fred is off the central planner’s grid; the antipode of the collective, an unroped stray escaped from the herd. Milverstedt is a freelance freedom fighter battling the steady encroachment of Bloomberg’s nanny state. From this remove, the man’s two major vices are power and speed. He expresses those vices through the language of two powerful machines: semi-automatic firearms and overpowered motorcycles. Who else would email JPEGs of his tight target grouping? Or extol the virtues of his AR-15?! That, my friends, is the difference between liberals and us conservatives. We brag on our vices; the progs apologize for theirs, then legislate reparations."

If there ever was a time on the bike when I really thought I might need a gun, it was a day when Barbi and I were out on the Shadow on a high ridge in western Wisconsin overlooking a series of lesser hills rolling away to the south. We’d stopped, parked the bike on the shoulder and got off to admire the view.

We were on State 33, not an untraveled road but a good piece from the New York Thruway. On this stretch, there was no other traffic, no other people, no houses or barns except those dotting the valleys below.

Around the curve comes a pick-up truck, slowing as it moves into sight. It stops next to us, not on the shoulder but the middle of the road. There’s two young guys inside.

Seldom one to make snap judgments, give or take now and then, I make one here.

Argues David Lat, rejecting the alternative of keeping up the present incoming class size by lowering admissions standards. The shrinkage model is painful:

Last week, we heard reports of one law school basically axing its entire junior faculty. All of the untenured professors received notice that their contracts might not be renewed for the 2014-2015 academic year. Ouch.

"There have always been writers, like Thomas Hardy and Saul Bellow, who kept at it until the very end, but there are many more, like Proust, Dickens and Balzac, who died prematurely, worn out by writing itself. Margaret Drabble may have started a trend when, in 2009, at the age of 69, she announced that she was calling it quits. [Alice] Munro said she was encouraged by the example of Philip Roth, who declared that he was done last fall, as he was getting ready to turn 80. 'I put great faith in Philip Roth,' she said, adding, 'He seems so happy now.'"

Admitting Ecuador made a 'mistake' in helping Snowden flee Hong Kong in the first place, [Ecuador's president Rafael Correa] appeared to backtrack on previous suggestions he was welcome, adding: "Are we responsible for getting him to Ecuador? It's not logical. The country that has to give him a safe conduct document is Russia."

Asked if he would like to meet the 30-year-old, he added: "Not particularly. He's a very complicated person. Strictly speaking, Mr Snowden spied for some time."

And there's a statement purporting to be from Snowden that pretty much can't have been written by Snowden. Find the tell:

"For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum."

ADDED: The tell is "have," the use of the plural verb with United States. American don't slip into that usage, though it's strictly correct if you're following the rules of grammar. The irregular form is second-nature to Americans. So does that mean Snowden couldn't have written that? No. Meade — in conversation just now — suggested that Snowden might have deliberately adopted the form that a non-American would use. But think what that means: He wants not to be American. That runs counter to a desire to refute the accusation that he is a traitor, but it's consistent with other statements of his that stress the world as a whole, including the term "human right" in the very sentence quoted above.

AND: Let's look at the whole text of his statement, which appears at the link. Right after the above-quoted sentence, we read:

Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country.

He says "my country," but "the current government of," and the law he cites is transnational law. That sentence suggests that "the current government" is undeserving of loyalty and to be distinguished from "my country."

Snowden proceeds to call himself a "stateless person," because the current government has revoked his passport (and obstructed his "right to seek asylum"). He asserts that the current government is "afraid" of its own people:

It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

Let me paraphrase: If the American people had the information — which I risked my life to set free — they would see the current government as illegitimate.

The sign-off is:

Edward Joseph Snowden
Monday 1st July 2013

I don't think it's too American to write the date like that. We tend to write: July 1, 2013. If you wanted to go all U.S. Constitution about it, you could write: First Day of July in the Year of our Lord two thousand and Thirteen. But "Monday 1st July 2013"? To my eye, that's either written by a non-American or an American affecting a transnational style.

Last November German authorities said they were planning to reinstate an old law forbidding sex with animals after a sharp rise in incidents of bestiality along with websites promoting it....

Hans-Michael Goldmann, chairman of the agriculture committee, said the government aimed to forbid using an animal 'for individual sexual acts and to outlaw people 'pimping' creatures to others for sexual use.'

German 'zoophile' group ZETA has announced it will mount a legal challenge should a ban on bestiality become law. 'Mere concepts of morality have no business being law,' said ZETA chairman Michael Kiok.

But U.S. District Judge John Koeltl [wrote:] "Congress provided an exception to the six year prohibition for plaintiffs under a legal disability and provided that such minors would have an additional three years to bring a claim after they turned eighteen.... This exception, combined with Congress’s failure to adopt a discovery rule in the face of statutes with explicit discovery rules and state sexual abuse statutes providing for application of a discovery rule, indicate that Congress did not provide for a discovery rule under Section 2255, and none should be implied."

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you tap your brake lights 3 times will we know it's you.

[J]ust 28% believe the Supreme Court is doing a good or an excellent job. At the same time, 30% rate its performance as poor. That’s the highest-ever poor rating. It’s also the first time ever that the poor ratings have topped the positive assessments. Thirty-nine percent (39%) give the court middling reviews and rate its performance as fair....

The very idea that the State is seeking to establish – that self-defense is conditional upon actually suffering serious injury – is, of course, ridiculous on its face. The purpose of the law of self-defense, particularly in the context of the use deadly defensive force, is to be able to protect yourself from an imminent threat of death or grave bodily harm before that harm occurs, not to require that you actually experience death or grave bodily harm before you may act to protect yourself.

"... but its presence on the menu leads us to swing over and pick something that’s worse for us than we normally would," explains Gavan J. Fitzsimons, a professor in consumer psychology at Duke University.

And economist Thomas C. Schelling wrote, in “Choice and Consequence”: “People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert... The two are in continual contest for control.”

From a news analysis piece in the NYT called "Why Healthy Eaters Fall for Fries." What's the agenda? I suspect they want to deprive us of choice. We can't handle it.

There’s nothing wrong with RSS feeds, or with Twitter. But they both bias my information diet in the same ways: Toward quick reads rather than long ones, toward writers and outlets I know rather than ones I don’t, toward blogs rather than other kinds of articles, and toward information I curated rather than information that someone else curated.

Those biases are dangerous for me. After all, my job is to keep coming up with new and interesting things things to report and write about. The more I read the same things over and over, and the more I read the same things that other writers read, the worse I’ll be at my job.

Watch the video at the link. It's really inspiring. Incredible that the old man did all the work himself, beginning with ripping down all the vines that had become a "mouse highway" to all the various holes in the place. How much after-tax income would they have had to spend to hire others to do this work? On the other hand, how many people can do this kind of work for themselves?

Here's the local newspaper coverage, which got me looking for the first link.

Now consider Texas state Senator Wendy R. Davis, who has recently been in the news being touted (however dubiously) as the Left’s technologically enhanced "feminist superhero." She is 50 years old.... If she has not found the Fountain of Youth, at minimum she has found very talented plastic surgeons and image consultants who have readied her for her closeup.

Remarkable! It's like she's aging backwards. I wouldn't criticize her for this, though. The blogger at the link says:

For someone who in the early 1990s was a feminist activist in law school, and who is currently posing as a champion of women’s rights, standing up to men who seek to dictate the way women should live, she seems to have devoted an unusual amount of attention to her physical appearance.

I assume the blogger is male. Maybe you are too and you need somebody to spell it out. The difference between the present-day pictures and the old Harvard Law School picture is attributable mostly to 2 things: hair and makeup. In the old photo, from 1991, she's wearing no (or almost no) makeup and natural hair. I remember 1991, and it was a real peak of feminist ideology. She fit her time. And she's fitting her time now.

Few American women today go on TV without makeup. It's not "Human Barbie Doll" to wear foundation and add definition to your eyes. It's distracting when a woman doesn't do that. Note that her eye makeup is far lighter than what has become the norm among TV news women, and she's doing that thing of emphasizing her eyes while leaving her lips almost natural — glossed, with no significant color. That's the well-known approach to toned-down makeup.

As for the hair, she's taken the simple and obvious steps of going blonde, straightening, and getting a somewhat competent cut. Blonde hair has a powerful effect, as many women have experienced. Who knows why it brings such glamor? The effect may be uncanny, but it's far simpler than a Fountain of Youth or plastic surgery, and it's available to anyone. You have to spend a little money to get it done with appropriate streaks, and so forth, but it's really not that big a deal. And for all I know, it's a wig Davis has got on.

First, there's the implicit claim that she is able to divine the inner workings of [Chief Justice] Roberts' decision making processes. She knows what's in his "head" and "heart," as if she were some psychic shrink....

Speculating about what's really going on behind the argle-bargle in the written opinions is something we must do to avoid falling for propaganda. I use the term "argle-bargle" to remind you of what Justice Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion in the DOMA case, Windsor:

[T]he real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by "'bare . . . desire to harm'" couples in same-sex marriages.

And that's just what Scalia feels is acceptable within the rigors of judicial opinion-writing. We must feel impelled to pull apart the judicial verbiage that we sometimes call the "decision" to try to see The Decision, which is to say, the mental processes that actually took place in the minds of the judges.

Of course, we can't really know. None of us, not even Linda Greenhouse, can divine the inner workings of anyone else's head. (Thank God! What a world this would be if we could!) But there is no more valuable inner working of your own head than to contemplate the inner workings of the heads of others. What fools we are if we take other people's words at face value! But — and here Professor Bainbridge is right — we are wrong if we present our speculation as the truth. If we posture as certain, those who don't like what we say can smack us down. You can't know that!

But I speculate that Linda Greenhouse — in the secret inner workings of the head that only she can access — knows her "The Real John Roberts Emerges" overstates what she knows about the inner workings of the mind of John Roberts. I presume that she has her reasons for writing like that. I presume, I don't know, but I could — if the inner workings of my mind cranked in this direction — write a blog post titled "The Real Linda Greenhouse Emerges." Or "The Real Stephen Bainbridge Emerges."

See if you can read my mind and tell why I don't think such cogitations need to be spelled out.

Suddenly, it's July, and I wonder if you're pronouncing the word correctly. The (unlinkable) OED says:

The word was usually stressed on the first syllable in the early modern period, as the form July-flower, due to folk etymology (see γ forms at gillyflower n.), implies. The orthoepists Peter Levins (1570) and Elisha Coles (late 17th cent.) both include the word among those which have unstressed -y, and Johnson (1755), W. Johnston Pronouncing & Spelling Dict. (1764), and J. Walker Dict. Answering Purposes of Rhyming (1775) all indicate stress on the first syllable (Johnston also marking the y as ‘long’). Both occurrences of the word in Shakespeare are so stressed, as are most metrical examples down to the late 18th cent..... Stress on the first syllable still occas. occurs in Scotland.

That's authoritative, even though the simplest Google detects an error. There are 3, not merely 2, occurrences of "July" in Shakespeare:

The Winter's Tale: "He makes a July's day short as December..."

Much Ado About Nothing: "The sixth of July: your loving friend, Benedick."

King Henry VIII: "And proofs as clear as founts in July when/We see each grain of gravel..."

We know these plays are written in iambic pentameter, so these lines prove the stress went on the first syllable. Who put the lie in July... and why?

Having re-examined his life through the lens of his own book, Mr. Slater decided in 1971 to resign as the chairman of the sociology department at Brandeis University, where he had taught for 10 years, and take a different path. He took up acting, wrote novels and began culling his personal possessions down to the two boxes he left when he died at 86 on June 20 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif....

He gave up his car, learned to live on one-fourth the income he was used to and began pursuing a life he would describe in a 1980 book, “Wealth Addiction,” as “voluntary simplicity."...

“The experience of losing everything and finding I was having a wonderful time,” he said, “opened me to experiences I otherwise would not have had. I would have protected myself from them if I had known.”

Sociology, circa 1970. I guess it couldn't last, this kind of sociology that made you not want to be a sociologist.

Instead, he will ask the Board of Regents to review its policy on housing organizations such as the center, which gets office space from the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Communications in exchange for paid student internships and guest lectures.

“It’s appropriate for (the Regents) to look at it,” Walker said in an interview Friday with the State Journal. “But it should be done in the context of a larger policy, not just specific to one organization.”

Right. Otherwise, he trips over the very principle he ought to want to promote: Don't discriminate based on political viewpoint.

"(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend" is a country and cowboy-style song [that] tells a folk tale of a cowboy who has a vision of red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the spirits of damned cowboys. One warns him that if he does not change his ways, he will be doomed to join them, forever "trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies."

Here's Marty Robbins singing the song. Or if you prefer: Johnny Cash. Or here it is by the singer who possesses the voice that is the first singing voice that I ever heard and thought: This is the greatest voice ever. I must have been about 4 years old at the time, considering the year that the greatest recording ever — as I saw it — came out (1955).

But back to "Ghost Riders." Here are the lyrics. I'd love parody lyrics applicable to apparitions of college-town bike riders.

"In the meeting with the CEO of the school, I was told that the reasons behind it were... that the boys were going to start lusting after her, and have impure thoughts about her," [Paige’s mother, Cassy Blythe] said. "And that locker room talk was not appropriate for a female to hear, even though she had a separate locker room from the boys."

So even in the mother's statement there's only a reference to what the boys "were going to" do — "start lusting" — not any accusation that the girl was "inciting." But the mother is paraphrasing what the CEO said, and we don't know how diplomatically he put his references to sex. Did he say "lust" — that 7 Deadly Sins word? The school is Strong Rock Christian, so readers are invited — incited! — to think that this is old-fashioned religion.

Then, the WaPo "social reader" writer Dan Carson opines:

I’m no philosopher, but when you ban preteen girls from being around boys while wearing shoulder pads, “inciting lust” sounds like a flimsy reason. After all, the rest of the girls on school grounds are wearing skirts and polos and aren’t covered in reeking hand-me-down padding.

If it sounds like a flimsy reason, consider that the mother — who wants her daughter on the team — had a motive to state the reason in terms that would sound flimsy. Carson ought to know about the meaning slippage that occurs in restatement, because — as you see there — he's the one that came up with "inciting." Carson's use of the quotes is defensible, but really confusing. It's not a quote of what anyone else said, but quotes used to indicate paraphrasing.

You wouldn't think federal judges, especially those working on secret things, would go public with their emotions, especially their emotions about how they themselves are portrayed, but that's the headline at WaPo. From the article:

“In my view, that draft report contains major omissions, and some inaccuracies, regarding the actions I took as Presiding Judge of the FISC and my interactions with Executive Branch officials,” [U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,] said in a statement to The Post...

The bug is reddish-brown, about an eighth of an inch long and has a hankering for honey dew — with a side of electronics. The insects nest anywhere and are easily transported, but so far have mostly infested Texas and several Southern states after being inadvertently transported from South America by humans....

They cause about $146.5 million in electrical damage a year because millions of ants are electrocuted in small circuits or wires, where they seek warmth....

"... are not doing themselves any favors. More seriously, this would be a good time for conservatives to take supporters of SSM at their word and insist on stronger cultural as well as legal affirmations of monogamy for everyone. Somehow, though, I suspect that rather than using this as an opportunity to build new coalitions against promiscuity or divorce, we’ll just see a redoubling of resentments."

"We all expected that they’d basically have to come down someday... We would like them to be permanent, but we know that’s not actually realistic. We just wanted to make sure that it was done respectfully and with the cooperation of the families," said bicycle advocate Ryan Guzy.

Floyd Reeser, a director at Bike Saviours and builder of both ghost bikes, said he was disappointed initially to hear that the memorials were being taken down and said they “should have been welded to the street” as a reminder of bike safety. However, after reading about how most of the ghost bikes are taken down, he echoed Guzy’s thoughts.

“To have one stay up for even a week would be a miracle in most places,” Reeser said.